On November 1 I was honored to speak at a University of Connecticut POLS Colloquium. Below are my remarks, as written. As delivered they included a pretty good Columbo impersonation and a few other asides, but this is pretty close to what I said.

My position is not a tenured one — I have a couple of Masters degrees, but I quit the PhD program that Professor Morrell finished. For the past two-plus decades I have worked in and around the federal government. I have served in senior positions in the House, Senate, and Obama administration, I’ve run and helped run advocacy, non-profit, for-profit, and quasi-governmental organizations, have lobbied, designed and managed issue and candidate campaigns, and have otherwise carved out a reasonably successful and really lucky life in the swamp. I was also an adjunct instructor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at GW for many years before joining the faculty fulltime last fall, and have taught at Emerson College, Clemson University, Arizona State University, and elsewhere.

Theory has always been the foundation of my courses.Protagoras is a staple in my political communication classes in part to raise ethics issues early, and in part to make juniors and seniors who have spent a couple hundred grand studying the art of politics uncomfortable about most of their career, if not their life, choices. My students have come to expect rants, good and bad, about George Lakoff, Jean Baudrillard, and others and I am overly fond of saying “it’s all warmed-over Aristotle.” The question of political communication ethics is usually part of other conversations, and occasionally it’s an exam question. We talk about Protagoras, argue about the implications of Nietzsche on language and whether or not Rorty offers a way out from the despair. But my job is mostly the practice of theory, not the theory of practice.

Today’s talk is part of a larger project that I hope will turn class mentions and occasional essays into focused and serious teaching and research on ethics in political communication.

The mid-20th Century rhetorical scholar and conservative public intellectual Richard Weaver lamented that “in the not-so-distant Nineteenth Century, to be a professor of rhetoric, one had to be somebody.” Tragically in the view of Weaver, “Beginners, part-time teachers, graduate students, faculty wives, and various fringe people, are now the instructional staff of an art which was once supposed to require outstanding gifts and mature experience.” (Language is Sermonic). As someone who assigned this reading from Weaver when I was an adjunct instructor and whose wife was for a time on the Board of Trustees at GW — making me both a part time teacher and a faculty spouse — I’ve always had a soft spot for Weaver’s lament.

Weaver’s complaint is not a new one. In about 95 C.E. the great Roman orator Quintilian wrote, “…for a considerable time the instructors of morals and of eloquence were identical.” (Institutio Oratoria, Book 12, Chapter 2). Quintilian further writes, “For as soon as the tongue began to offer a way of making a living, and the practice developed of making a bad use of good gifts of eloquence, those who were counted able speakers abandoned moral concerns and these [moral concerns], left to themselves, became as it were the prey of weaker minds.” (quoted by Arthur Walzer in“Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Institutes: Quintilian on Honor and Expediency”).

For Weaver, rhetoric is “truth plus its artful presentation…” He goes on to write that “rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links that chain extending up toward the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for.” (The Ethics of Rhetoric) Weaver, like Plato, argues that rhetoric is, or ought to be, about the nature of the good. Such a claim assumes that there is a good, that it is knowable, and that it can be communicated (or drawn out, depending on how Platonic you’re feeling). But if there is no universal good, if there is a universal good but we really ought not talk about it while we’re still up for tenure, or if there is a universal good but we can’t comprehend it or communicate it even if we could comprehend it, then it seems easy to just teach, as Phaedrus conceded the sophists teach, “not what is really right, but what is likely to seem right in the eyes of the mass of people who are going to pass judgment: not what is really good or fine but what will seem so…” Or as Socrates helpfully rephrased it, “a method of influencing men’s minds by means of words.” (Phaedrus — it is worth noting the above from Weaver is from a chapter titled “Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric”).

But if rhetoric is removed from fields devoted to the study and teaching of the public good, public discourse, and persuasion with a civic or civil purpose, we risk becoming Plato’s parody of the sophists. Absent a foundation in The Good, or at least a nod to a good, rhetoric becomes the worst kind of public relations, something the clever do on behalf of the smart. It is “making bad use of good gifts.”

How did we get here? I blame Harvard. More precisely, I accept that a piece in the July-August 1995 issue of Harvard Magazine called “How Harvard Destroyed Rhetoric” is accurate. The piece was written by Jay Heinrichs, who was the editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine at the time. Do with that credential what you will. Heinrichs points out that Harvard’s first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory was John Quincy Adams, who taught courses while serving in the US Senate –which is to say he was a part-time teacher. Over time oratory in the service of public debate gave way to oratory in the service of enjoyment or enlightenment. The Professorship is now held by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham. She replaced Seamus Heaney, a poet and Nobel laureate in literature. He replaced poet Robert Fitzgerald. And so on. Plato may have set rhetoric against philosophy, but at least they were in the same conversation. Harvard separated rhetoric from philosophy entirely.

Plato started the debate about whether or not one could both be a philosopher and a rhetorician, two thousand years later that debate is over and Plato appears to have won. We need to demand a rematch.

We need to teach political communication ethics because, in the words of Lee Pelton, the president of Emerson College, my alma mater, “the world is still in want of clear headed citizens, tempered by historical perspective, disciplined by rational thinking and moral compass, who speak well and write plainly.” Not for nothing, President Pelton earned his PhD in English from Harvard with a focus on 19th Century British prose and poetry.

Teaching ethics in political communication is tricky. It’s easy to agree with Weaver that rhetoric ought to be taken seriously because what we say matters and ought to be tied to greater ethical Good both because the Good is Good, and also because it is necessarily more persuasive because it is Good — even the sophist Protagoras would agree with the last point. It’s tougher to point to The Good, the ethical foundation, of which rhetoric is a part. If we were down the road-ish at Fairfield University this would be easy: we’d debate all semester, and in the end the Jesuits would win. But we’re not, and the Jesuits might be wrong. The Koran might have the last word, or the Torah, the Ashem Vohu, or the Ramayana. What if Nietzsche had it right that truth is a “mobile army of metaphor, metonymy, and anthropomorphism” or worse what if Baudrillard was right and we’re all just tourists lost in the desert of the real?

A pretty good description of the program in which I teach, the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University, comes from Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. Socrates’ young friend Hippocrates was excited that the sophist Protagoras was in town, and was eager to study under him. But when pressed about precisely what Protagoras taught, Hippocrates couldn’t come with an answer beyond Protagoras being someone who “knows wise things.” This seriously troubles Socrates because “knowledge is food of the soul” and when the “soul is in question” one can’t be too careful. So Socrates helpfully agrees to scout the situation out for his young friend, and they head off to meet the sophist. Doing his best Peter Falk as Colombo impersonation, Socrates then asks Protagoras the same set of questions he asked Hippocrates. Protagoras tells Hippocrates, “the very day you join me, you will go home a better man, and the same the next day. Each day you will make progress towards a better state.” Socrates presses on Hippocrates behalf — better at what? If Hippocrates studied under a painter he’d get better at painting, if he studied under a flautist he’d get better at playing the flute, if he studies under a sophist what will he get better at? This is the important bit:

Protagoras: What is the subject? The proper care of his personal affairs, so that he may best manage his own household, and also of the State’s affairs, so as to become a real power in the city, both as speaker and man of action.

Socrates: …I take you to be describing the art of politics, and promising to make men good citizens.

Protagoras: That…is exactly what I profess to do.

Socrates: …I did not think this was something that could be taught.

Protagoras’s claim is UConn’s claim, or at least used to be UConn’s claim. The 1943/44 bulletin, the oldest on *the school’s website, defines the purpose of the University as including:

The College of Arts and Sciences is designed to provide a broad foundation which will equip its students for further specialization or for immediate entrance into adult life and citizenship…

[The University] is concerned with the all-around development of its students, and, to this end, it provides for their intellectual, physical, social, spiritual, ethical and emotional well-being.

In its human relations the University seeks to increase the freedom which true education fosters.

Before you dismiss the standards and policies of the 1940s entirely, you should know that the same Bulletin estimated that tuition, room, board, books, and incidental university expenses for in-state students was between $460 and $550 a year. In a footnote the Bulletin noted that “Ten dollars should be added to these figures in the case of women students,” so not all good, but still, $500 a year in state. Just saying.

Consistent with the mission of the University, if not the cost, the current mission of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, “is to create and disseminate knowledge in the natural, physical, and social sciences and the humanities, and to help students acquire the skills and knowledge to become independent thinkers, lifelong learners, and responsible citizens.” Drifting from the 1944 mission, but responsible citizenship is still there.

The Political Science Department’s website says: Political Science serves students whose primary interest is in some phase of public affairs (law, politics, government service) or international relations (foreign service), in gaining a better understanding of the entire field of governmental organization and functions.

Citizenship and ethics are implied, and presumably discussed, but notably absent. This absence matters in part because the Center for Career Development points out that “political consulting” is a popular field for UConn poli sci alumni, and suggests the following curriculum:

I applaud UConn for training political consultants. One could make a reasonable case that the field of political consulting — the field in which I have spent most of my career and that many of my students go in to — was founded by the sophists. In the introduction to their 2003 book, The Greek SophistsJohn Dillon and Tania Gergel wrote that the “fees quoted for a full course from Protagoras or Gorgias [was] 100 minea (upwards of £100,000 or $160,000 in today’s prices).” That’s roughly a $15,000/month retainer, which is what a lot of lobbying and strategic consulting firms charge their basic clients.

But in lining up how we used to train people to succeed in public affairs, and how we now teach them, you can begin to see what I’m getting at. It’s not that UConn hasn’t moved on from a troubled past into a better future. Some of what UConn did in the 1940s shouldn’t have ever made it that far — for example, the University didn’t hire its first fulltime African American professor until 1957. But some of what has been lost is worth finding ways to reintegrate into research and teaching. It is time to re-engage the debate about the connections between rhetoric and philosophy, between political communication and ethics.

I hate the phrase “now more than ever.” By definition, the moment it the phrase is read it is wrong, because it is read after it is written, making it “then more than ever” with “then” being whenever it was the author first thought about dropping the cliché into the document. But there does seem to be some urgency to find ways to reunite civic and political education, citizenship, ethics, and politics.

Political rhetoric has become, in Orwell’s words, “designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” in part because he have cut it adrift from its moorings.

I’m with Aristotle that rhetoric is not political science, but rhetoric is important to the practice of politics. In the Rhetoric Aristotle explains, “Ethical studies may fairly be called political; and for this reason rhetoric masquerades as political science, and the professors of it as political experts — sometimes from want of education, sometimes from ostentation, sometimes owing to other human failings.” For Aristotle, deliberative rhetoric is speech arguing about the best way forward into an uncertain future, which is to say it is political communication.

For the sophists, those great political consultants of yore, there may be an ultimate good but we can’t know it, so we have to find the best way forward we can, and the best way to do that is through deliberation. Those who would engage public debate should learn how to construct and deliver arguments. Through eloquence and deliberation the best path will emerge. For Protagoras, for whom “man is the measure of all things,” this is the art of politics. The somewhat more notorious Gorgias was also somewhat more cynical. In a philosophically prescient piece he may have argued that nothing exists, even if it did exist man couldn’t apprehend it, and even if he could apprehend it he couldn’t express it. All we have is how we talk about things. That talk, therefore, should be good. There are two great asides about Gorgias. The first is that he is reported to have had a gold statue of himself put in the town square, which feels very 2018, and when asked the secret to a long life — he died at 108 — he said he never let himself get dragged to other people’s parties.

Rhetoric went to poetry and speech departments. Speech became communications, and for undergraduates, it mostly means film or television, public relations or marketing, or similar degrees that teach people to present cleverly what other, smarter, people come up with. Philosophy went deep into philosophy, and with the exception of a handful of people like Richard Rorty — who abandoned philosophy in favor of poetry — it is largely absent from day to day politics. Political scientists study how politics works and how political systems work, but by and large leave questions of “ought” and “how to” to others. The exception at UConn may be your president, who studied political science and earned a PhD in communication theory. Mike Morrell comes close in his study of public discourse — how we can or ought to go about talking to each other in the public square.

Over in the Communications Department it’s much the same. A lot of people who seem smart and dedicated, but not a rhetorical scholar or ethicist in the bunch. One course description in the major lists ‘responsibilities’ once — and tellingly it’s a course on communication law, not persuasion or campaigns. Individual professors may talk about ethics in individual classes, but ethics are not a core feature of classes that future politicians and political consultants may take.

The policy program similarly offers nothing obvious in the way of ethics. The philosophy department has faculty who teach philosophy and language, but precious little that would encroach on either rhetoric or politics. Indeed, the word “rhetoric” doesn’t appear to appear in UConn’s course catalogs outside of the English department and courses on “rhetoric and composition.”

I don’t just mean to pick on UConn. You at least offer courses in politics and ethics. Southern Connecticut State appears to offer no courses in what could be called communication ethics or political ethics. UMass has one grad class in public administration responsibility. Quinnipiac offers majors in Public Relations, Advertising and Integrated Communications, and Communication and Media Studies but apparently no courses in ethics in any of them. Central Connecticut State offers a BA in Strategic Communication with no offerings in ethics. One localish exception is, predictably, Fairfield University which in addition to offering several applied and communication ethics courses requires those getting a degree in public relations to take an ethics course. This isn’t just a Connecticut and Western Mass thing. A study published in the journal Communication Education in 2015 found that only 51% of institutions that responded to a survey about communication ethics reported offering optional or required courses in communication ethics, broadly defined. The article, which updates similar earlier research, references media ethics, journalism, advertising, small group communication, interpersonal communication, and other important sub-fields — but not political communication.

As evidence that I am willing to bite every hand that feeds me, the School of Media and Public Affairs at GW, a program which has produced one of President Obama’s top speechwriters, the only speechwriter Senator Marco Rubio has ever had, Beto O’Rourke’s communications director, the communications director for Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo, Facebook’s first hire in DC, and many many more, has offered one course in political communication ethics, once. It was taught by me, last spring.

Some people who graduate from college go into politics. An increasing number start college with a career in politics in mind. Many of those students major in political science, and learn how our system was formed and how it operates. They may learn theories of representation, and the relative merits of different approaches to managing who gets stuff. Along the way they may take courses in public relations or strategic communication to pick up some skills they think they will need. But universities that sometimes don’t trust students to have the fortitude to listen to a speaker with whom they disagree or a topic that makes them uncomfortable assume that these same students will intuitively connect Rawls and Instagram, will find a Tocquevillean critique of Twitter too obvious to even bother discussing, or find a discussion of Rousseau and Facebook banal. We then wonder why young political operatives seem to have no ethical mooring, or are surprised when they insist that disagreement is somehow ignoble or worse. Argument is at the heart of politics, that’s sort of the point of politics. But we don’t teach our students that the point of political argument is to find the best path forward and then how to engage in those arguments. That means we don’t teach them that the path forward is about something greater than the win in the moment, that there is more at stake than the next election, numbers of clicks, or owning the libs. We don’t teach them that, in Weaver’s words, “ideas have consequences.”

The problem is getting worse. Rather than “now more than ever” or “a couple of weeks ago when I started drafting this than ever and then a bit more so on Monday when I was editing this while proctoring a midterm” we’re in the position of “soon more than ever,” we need to re-energize the study of political communication ethics and reintegrate ethics in political communication into the curriculum.

Politics is increasingly professionalized. We are awash in lobbyists, digital strategists, strategic communication consultants, speechwriters, professional community organizers, direct mail firms, TV and radio production houses, and fundraisers who pay for all of it and more. There are legislative staff, White House staff, governmental and quasi-governmental agencies, trade associations, non-profit and advocacy organizations, think tanks, and much more. The political industrial complex can be fun, exciting, important, and while only a few get rich most do well enough to at least spend some time advocating for what might broadly be called the public good. These professionals are graduating from UConn, UMass, Southern Connecticut, Harvard, Fairfield, Emerson, GW, and just about everywhere else.

Colleges and universities are both responding to and feeding this demand. More and more academics are studying political communication, more and more professors are teaching courses in it, and more and more students are learning it.

The George Washington University claims to be the first school to offer a degree in political communication in 1982. I will assert that Emerson College was second in 1986 — my degree, which I received in 1987, is a BS in Speech with a focus on Communication, Politics, and Law. According to the Princeton Review, 10 colleges now offer a degree in political communication, though I’m certain that’s an underestimate. The number goes up if you count graduate programs — many of which are basically technical schools for political hacks. More and more schools offer courses in speech writing, strategic communication, political advertising, and so on. But if you google “political communication ethics syllabus” an alarming number of results are my class. That’s not good news. The person who edited the book called Political Communication Ethics, Professor Robert Denton at Virginia Tech, is retiring. Again, not good news.

It is time that political communication followed business, journalism, medicine, and public relations, in making ethics a “thing.”

As the business of business became more complex, programs in teaching business emerged. The first MBA was offered in 1908 by Harvard. The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at the time was an English teacher named LaBarron Russell Briggs. Briggs went on to become the Dean of Men and helped launch student services as something universities provided. One story goes that a Harvard undergraduate, having knocked a Yale student unconscious late at night after a football game, rushed to Briggs’ home and declared, “Dean Briggs, I’ve killed a Yale man in the Yard.” Briggs replied, “Why bother me at this time of night? Come to the office Monday morning and collect the customary bounty.” The bit about Briggs isn’t really relevant, I just think it’s a funny story and a bit telling about the status of rhetoric in 1908.

As it became clear that left to their own devices business leaders might not always make ethically sound decisions, schools began to teach business ethics. According to the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, the first business ethics courses were widely offered by the 1960s, and the term “business ethics” entered common parlance in the 1970s.

We should do for political communication what others have done for business. Those who want to go into fields that are primarily talking about politics — running for office, speech writing, ads, campaigning, lobbying, and so forth — should have to take courses in political communication ethics. Courses in speech writing, campaigning, advocacy, and so forth should include at least one session on ethics.

Academics should probe the question of political communication ethics. Can there be a political communication “ethic” in the United States absent a shared external understanding of the Good? If so, to what should ethics be tied? Is this a moment to unite Rorty, Bellah, and Gorski with Aristotle? Can we accept Weaver’s admonitions but leave his politics on the curb? Or should we adopt his politics as well? What are the electoral implications of “ethical” campaigning? What is the relationship between norms and ethics? Do those who run on or with “pro-norm” messaging do better or worse than those who do not? Where and how do voters learn political norms? What do they count as ethical? Is there a gap between what academics think about ethics and how ethics are practiced? What do we do about that?

The word “rhetoric” might have fled the political stage for the relative safety and relative anonymity of poetry. But the original function of rhetoric — be it the “art of discovering all of the available means of persuasion in a given situation” (Aristotle), “good men speaking well” (Quintilian), or Weaver’s higher good — remains. We talk about politics, and politics is our talk. We debate and vote instead of beating each other up, or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Ethics may have fled with rhetoric, but instead of hiding out with poetry it appears to have stopped in a local bar, and stayed there. Ethics is the kid rhetoric left at a rest-stop saying he’d be right back.

It is past time to reintegrate ethics and rhetoric, and rhetoric and politics. If our political communication seems grounded in pure wind that may be because those of us who taught those doing the political communication never suggested it should, or even could be otherwise. We should fix that.

]]>https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/a-call-to-return-to-the-study-and-teaching-of-ethics-in-political-communication/feed/0Our Comments About Senator McCain Are at Least as Much About Ourselveshttps://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/our-comments-about-senator-mccain-are-at-least-as-much-about-ourselves/
https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/our-comments-about-senator-mccain-are-at-least-as-much-about-ourselves/#respondFri, 23 Nov 2018 20:39:58 +0000https://www.peterloge.com/?p=815Also posted on Medium.

It is easy to honor the dead. We can pick moments from long and complicated lives of others to paint a complete picture of what we hope our lives will be remembered for having been. A eulogy is, of course, about the person being eulogized. It is also about the moment in which the eulogy is delivered, our own hopes and fears, and the case we want to make about what should come next. Our reflections on the dead are at least as much about ourselves and our time as they are about those on whose behalf we are reflecting.

This weekend’s words for Senator McCain are about the man. They are also about our moment and ourselves. Consider how this weekend’s public expressions would be different if he and Palin had won in 2008, or had he died half way through the first term of President Hillary Clinton or President Marco Rubio.

Lives are never just one thing. No one of us is the best or worst thing we have ever done. But headlines are short and history’s limited attention span demands a slogan. The headline and slogan become aspirations toward which the rest of us should aspire, flawed and complicated and headline and slogan-free as we may be. Kennedy was promise cut short. Lincoln was martyred to save the Union and King was martyred bending the moral arc of our nation. And so it shall be with Senator John McCain, an honorable maverick in a time of dishonor and blind political loyalty. An incomplete slogan that does disservice to a complicated man who made raw political calculations in a life devoted to public service. But it may be the slogan our moment demands. Maybe the headlines marking McCain’s death and history’s slogan of his life are the ethical foundation and political aspiration we need right now.

Every strategic communications professional has her or his own favorite model for doing strategic communications. There are toolkits, charts, workbooks, boxes, and more. Most of them mostly say the same thing, and all of them owe a debt to Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

In this regard, I am no different from my strategic communication professional colleagues. From my perspective, successful strategic communication is one admonition and five steps. The toolkits, charts, templates, boxes, and the rest all have these elements at their core. When I write plans for clients, and when I teach courses on strategic communication, this is where I start.

Admonition:

Strategy is not tactics.

Five Steps:

1.) Identify a clear goal;

2.) Determine who has power over your goal;

3.) Learn what people with power find persuasive;

4.) Learn to whom people with power listen about the topic; and

5.) Do that.

Admonition: Strategy is not Tactics

Strategy is the approach, tactics are how you implement the approach. Strategy is how you will frame your issue, the conceptual model you will use to get from here to your goal. The tactics are the tools you will use to make it happen. For example, talking about climate change as a public health issue rather than a national security issue, a faith-based issue, a legacy issue, and so on is a strategic decision. The tactics used to make that goal happen are getting articles about climate change in public health publications, getting doctors to talk to their patients about health threats from climate change, and so on. Tactics can be fun and are easy to come up with, but absent a strategy, tactics are just marbles rattling around in a tin box in search of a tune.

Five Steps

1.)Identify a Clear Goal

A good strategic communication plan has a clear, measurable goal. Your goal should answer the question, “how will the world be different tomorrow because of what I do today?” That answer should be as precise as possible. Good goals are “cut litter in the park in half,” “get the city council to vote for light rail,” and “get people to floss more.” Weak goals are “increase understanding” and “raise awareness.” The point of strategic communication is action — as Aristotle taught, “The use of persuasive speech is to lead to decisions.” Understanding and awareness may be a step on the road to action, but they are not action themselves. It is very likely that you know you ought to floss more — you probably don’t floss enough not out of ignorance, but out of inertia or some other force. For my part, I know I should drink less soda and more water, and yet that knowledge is not enough to prevent me from heading to the store next to my office to grab a Sprite. As Ann Christiano and Annie Neidmand of the University of Florida put it,stop raising awareness already.

2.)Determine Who Has Power over Your Goal

The person with power is the person who can take or block the action you want. These are the litterers, city council members whose votes you need to win, and those of us who don’t floss enough. The “American people” as an imagined whole do not have power. There are more than 300 million of us, and some of us believe some really weird things. The odds are exceptionally slim that you could get us all to agree on anything. Even if “a majority of Americans agree,” it may not mean much — if public opinion in general mattered, we would have stricter gun laws and Hillary Clinton would be President. Similarly, “the press” do not have power as a conceptual group with a single point of view — those with power may be persuaded by some members of some media, which means they are a means to the end of power, but not power itself (an idea I’ll get to later). Similarly, Congress and “policymakers” as a conceptual group do not have power. Some members of Congress and some policymakers have some power some of the time. The Speaker of the House of Representatives has power — she or he can ensure a bill comes to the floor for a vote, or prevent even the most popular of bills from seeing the light of day. A Representative from the minority party in his first term, on the other hand, has little power over anything. When it comes to policy making, heads of agencies and those whose votes can make up a majority have power — agency staff who are not final decision makers and those whose votes do not make up a deciding majority do not have power. They can influence power, but themselves are only means to the final end of policy or behavior change. Power lies with the person who can write the check, sign the bill, block the vote, put the can in the recycling bin, and pull the floss through the teeth.

3.)Learn what Power Finds Persuasive

Framing and agenda setting are important tools in reaching power — if you can control the terms of the debate, you are much more likely to win that debate. Your task is to determine how those in power view your issue, and then to get the attention of those in power in a way that makes them want to adopt your view.

As Aristotle noted, “Persuasiveness is persuasiveness for an individual.” Persuasion is not universal; there is no ideal and perfect persuasive message out there waiting to be found. Persuasion is unique to the person who needs to be persuaded.

We all like to think of ourselves as reasonable, rational people who come to conclusions for reasonable, rational, reasons. We tend to think of others the same way, at least initially. As such, when we try to get someone to do something we typically use the reasons (we think) persuaded us. If that person disagrees, if she refuses to floss, continues to litter, or votes against us, then we repeat ourselves a little louder and a little more slowly. We turn into American tourists in France looking for Disneyland Paris — full of hand gestures and shouted slow-motion phrases. If the person still disagrees with us (or sends us to what is clearly the international departures terminal of the airport instead of Ratatouille — The Adventure), we dismiss him or her as irrational, venal, or stupid. The person we’re trying to persuade may be all of those things, but odds are good that person is just like we are — trying to make sense of a complicated world the best way they know how. As clever as we all think we are and with apologies to A.A. Milne, we are all just bears of little brains.

The challenge for the advocate or behavioral change communicator is finding what approach to an issue will get someone to pay attention and act (agenda setting and framing for those keeping score). Teenage boys care about things that can help them get dates or that prevent them from getting dates. Telling them about the long-term cardiovascular effects of poor oral hygiene is unlikely to get them to floss — but telling them boys with good breath and nice teeth get kissed more than boys with bad breath and dirty teeth will have them flossing constantly. Policy examples of the power of framing abound — up until about 1999 or 2000, the death penalty was “about” mass murderers, since then it has largely been “about” innocent people on death row and fair trials. As a result, the numbers of executions have been steadily falling and the number states limiting or abolishing the death penalty have increased. The death penalty is of course about both of those things, and many more, but people tend to view issues one at a time and one way at a time. If the focus is on the guilty, there is one policy outcome; if the focus is on the innocent, there is another policy outcome. “Don’t Mess with Texas” started as an anti-littering campaign after years of signs saying litterers would be fined had failed to reduce the amount of roadside garbage. Littering can still get you fined, litter still pollutes the earth and creates environmental hazards. Litter also runs against Texas pride. When pride is put front and center, people protect that pride by not littering. An entire consulting firm called the Frameworks Institute is devoted to the idea that issue framing matters.

The very best campaigns don’t get those with power to think something new — the very best campaigns remind people with power of something they already believe (Aristotle again). Most of us believe a lot of different things, often about the same topic and not always in ways that make objective sense. Rather than shout at us to think something new, help us see how your idea fits well with what we already believe to be true. Don’t tell me men who rape and murder deserve to live — remind me everyone deserves a fair trial. Don’t tell me not to toss a burger wrapper from the window of a speeding car in the middle of the night because I might get a fine or hurt a bird — remind me that I’m proud of Texas and Texas isn’t full of roadside garbage. And don’t tell me that in half a century, I’m going to regret not flossing after scarfing down an entire pepperoni and onion pizza — tell me if I want a shot at the cutie at the next table, I should make sure my breath doesn’t stink.

4.)Learn From Whom Power Finds the Message Persuasive

The messenger matters. Who says something can help determine how what is said gets heard. The person talking predisposes us to believe or disbelieve what is being said, to listen or tune out, and to learn new information or stubbornly hold on to what we already believe. Imagine you hear that “Donald Trump said…” Odds are very good you will form an opinion about whatever he said before sentence is complete. The same is true outside of politics. Odds are good that you don’t turn to your accountant for health advice or to your doctor for help with your taxes. In addition to making a claim believable, the right messenger can help reinforce the framing of an issue. For example, researchers have found that local television meteorologists are effective climate change messengers because they help make the issue local, real, and about the immediate effects people feel every day. Similarly, people trust pediatricians when they talk about the health effects of climate change, in part because they reinforce that the issue is not about a distant dystopia or Al Gore, but about my kid right here and now. It is important to think not just about what those in power find persuasive, but from whom they find it persuasive.

The press falls into this category. As I wrote above, “the press” as an imagined single entity does not have power. As a colleague who once served as the Washington Bureau Chief for CNN likes to say, “there’s no standing 7am conference call to plan that day’s liberal agenda.” Some press may help reach some people in power some of the time, but the press itself is an unruly mass of writers, producers, bloggers, personalities, editors, and more. Before reaching out to the press you need to think about how those in power will respond to the specific newspaper, TV show, radio station, or podcast as a messenger. A lot of people want to be in the New York Timesbecause it is a big and important newspaper. The problem is that the Times is viewed by many as liberal and elitist and therefore isn’t trustworthy, and because it’s based in New York, it doesn’t “get us” here in wherever we are that isn’t New York. (On the flip side, it can be a great way to get the attention of liberal New Yorkers). If you want to get the attention of an elected official, get the attention of their hometown newspaper or the first national media outlet they consume in the morning.

5.)Do That

The first steps in this process are fun. Coming up with new and creative strategies can be exciting and invigorating. A bunch of folks brainstorm, do some research, think big thoughts, and write a plan. Writing the plan is a bit like solving a puzzle — you cast about for clues, assemble parts, and admire your final product. Implementing the plan, however, is not typically fun. It requires ongoing discipline and focus. Doing your plan means not doing other things that sound interesting or possibly important. It means doing the sometimes tedious work of editing and re-editing documents, finding new messengers and keeping them on message, keeping track of who has power now and who might have it tomorrow, there are usually lots of lists involved — all of the nuts and bolts of getting the work done. There is an old story that someone asked a great artist how he was able to carve such a beautiful swan from a plain chunk of stone. “It is easy,” replied the sculptor, “find a piece of stone and cut away everything that doesn’t look like a swan.” But of course it isn’t easy — deciding to carve a swan and imagining what it might look like is easy, imagining the sculpture in the home of an important collector or major museum is fun. The work of carving is difficult, frustrating, and takes practice. Designing your campaign is imagining a marble swan; running your campaign is carving it from a slab of rock.

Conclusion

There are endless paths to walk for each of these steps. Narrative theory, framing, media effects, ethos, behavioral economics, metaphor, and more are all ways to help create the right message from the right messenger for the right audience. I would wager that the amount of trees killed to produce books on management — the how to “do that” step — have made a measurable impact on the world’s climate. (I’m not throwing stones here, I wrote one of those books). But polished down to its key elements this model is a simple and effective way to understand, design, and run strategic communication campaigns.

]]>https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/successful-strategic-communication-an-admonition-and-five-steps/feed/0Remarks on the State of Clear Writinghttps://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/remarks-on-the-state-of-clear-writing/
https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/remarks-on-the-state-of-clear-writing/#respondWed, 09 May 2018 01:47:37 +0000https://www.peterloge.com/?p=718I was honored to give the keynote speech at the 2018 ClearMark Awards dinner, an event sponsored by the Center for Plain Language honoring clear writing. Below are my remarks as written (and more or less mostly as given).

Thank you for inviting me to join you at this important event, and congratulations to tonight’s honorees. Apropos of the occasion I will keep my remarks short, but as proof that more work needs to be done they will still likely be too long.

I was asked to give a bit of an historical perspective and speculate about the future of plain, clear, writing. Before diving in, I should note that I have seen, and committed, a lot of bad writing. I have spent a career in politics, government, and academia. None of which are known for their precise and clear prose. A key difference among the three is that in politics you try to use as many words as possible to say as little as possible and ideally mean even less, in government you try to use as few words as possible to cover every possible objection and account for every possible fear of every possible person above you on the food chain. As a professor I read of academics who are trained to believe that the more words and footnotes the better the idea, and I spend a lot of my time explaining to students that if they can end a sentence with “by zombies” and they are not in fact writing about zombies, then they are writing in the passive voice.

With this in mind, I offer bad news, worse news, slightly less worse news, and then suggest how and why it will all be fine in the end.

First the bad news. As one commentator noted, “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.” He went on to say that “in our time, it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.” Some may recognize the jabs as George Orwell’s in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. The bad news is that the problem of poor writing is old and hasn’t been solved. The worse news is that complaints about flowery and pointless language date back at least to Socrates who called “conciseness of speech” a “very rare thing.”

The pamphlet…is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “high-brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’ All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short. (Quoted in Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University Press, 1967)

Now the slightly less worse, potentially even good or at least goodish news. C3PO, a character from the future from my past once whined “we’re doomed.” But like C3PO we may not be doomed yet. This awards event is evidence that people who matter, care. This organization is a demonstration of your collective commitment to proving Orwell wrong. Government writing is better today than it was 10 years ago. Online and mobile media are forcing writers to be more direct. That you are here tonight demonstrates that good communicators are winning.

How do we accelerate progress and get to an imagined future of short sentences that only end with “by zombies” if they are about zombies? There are several things all of you, each of us, can do to keep your momentum going.

First and foremost, remember why you write. Know exactly what you want to convey and to whom you want to convey it. How will the world be different tomorrow because of what you write today? If you do not know exactly who you want to get to do what, your writing will be weak. With that,

My favorite piece of writing advice comes from the noir crime writer Elmore Leonard: “Try to leave out the part readers tend to skip.” He also said that you should never open a book with the weather, which got me thinking about how that would go at federal agencies, “It was a gray day in a gray town. Unlike my suit, the weather fit me. Gray rain was falling. The rain fell in sheets, gray unwashed sheets, sheets that had seen better days. But so had I. So had we all. Into this rain washed the Department of Transportation 14 CFR Part 252 Docket No. DOT–OST–2011–0044 RIN 2105–AE06 Smoking of Electronic Cigarettes on Aircraft.”

Hemingway apparently never said, “write drunk, edit sober.” The spirit of the advice is good — write carelessly, freely, as if the entire world were possible. Then edit like everything mattered and it hurt. Cut and trim and cut and trim. Be as ruthless in your editing as you are free in your writing. But,

Write as if you are going to be read, not edited. A lot of writing is defensive. Junior staff write anticipating edits of those above them, who edit in anticipation of those further up the food chain. Documents meant to convey meaning to the public are written to convey caution to employers. Don’t write expecting edits, write expecting readers. The edits will come regardless of what you do, so you might as well do your best. The corollary is to edit as if the writing will be read, not edited again. Write and edit with your reader in mind, not your boss or your lawyer.

Say simply simply what you want to say. Here it helps to recall a conversation between Milo and Tock in the classic children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth — “I never knew words could be so confusing,” Milo said….. “Only when you use a lot to say a little,” answered Tock.

That means you need to know who your reader is, and what they need to hear to get them to do what you want them to do. You are not your reader. Persuasion is about the person being persuaded, not the persuader. Write for real people who do real things in the real world. A terrific example of this is the “Food Plate” developed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama. We all grew up with the food pyramid, which is a bit daft because we don’t eat off of pyramids. We eat off of plates. The new chart says “this is what a healthy plate looks like, do this.” The old chart said “This is a pyramid, you probably read about those in school, the famous ones are in Egypt where they found King Tut (funky Tut), now imagine if this food were on your round plate and not King Tuts grave, do that.” Daft.

Read more fiction. That means reading less political and trade stuff. Fiction tends to be better written, it will help you think more creatively, and it’s more interesting. Read Hemingway’s “A Clean Well Lighted Place.” Read Leonard. Read Fitzgerald and Dos Passos — and if you can write like Fitzgerald and Dos Passos for heavens sakes quit your job and write, they were astonishing. If you can’t write like them, don’t try at work. But really, if you can, put a cookie in your pocket and go home and write.

All we have is how we talk to each other. As such how we talk to each other matters. You know that, and you care about that. That’s why you’re here. Keep it up. Keep talking to each other, not at each other. Listen and respond, don’t rant and berate. Keep writing to be understood, not to avoid having to stay late on a Thursday when you’re trying to beat Bay Bridge traffic and the rain is coming down, a gray rain falling in sheets, gray sheets that have seen better days.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas are the foundations for much of our democracy, once criticized “long discourses” and preferred “mute eloquence.” I will finally take Rousseau’s advice and stop talking.

]]>https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/remarks-on-the-state-of-clear-writing/feed/0Two Lessons for Organizations and Young Staff from Two Young Playershttps://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/two-lessons-for-organizations-and-young-staff-from-two-young-players/
https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/two-lessons-for-organizations-and-young-staff-from-two-young-players/#respondWed, 28 Feb 2018 12:35:54 +0000https://www.peterloge.com/?p=712

“We’ve got a lot of guys who will lead.” — DC United head coach Ben Olsen

Anyone can lead. Leadership is about who you are and what you do — it’s not about your title or your age. Leadership on a soccer field is distributed. On some plays some players take control, at other points those same players are following another player. The best players know when to step up and when to step back, when to lead and when to follow. When I interviewed Sarah Warren, an academic administrator and former collegiate player for my upcoming book Soccer Thinking for Management Success, she told me that “People can lead from the front, from behind, from the side…they might lead in one play but hang back on another…they might be a veteran player or a rookie. If you’re playing well as a team, leadership is distributed and fluid.” As Paul Arriola, one of the young players on whom Olsen is relying notes, “Being a leader doesn’t mean having the captain’s band or talking with a microphone.” Russell Canouse, another young player to whom Olsen is turning, told Goff that “anyone can take over and have an impact on a game and impact off the field…” The same is true for staff in organizations. If an organization has a clear goal, and the staff have a shared understanding of the strategy to achieve that goal and what is expected of them, then it is easy for the right person to step up in the right moment.

“They are going to lead in their own way.” — Ben Olsen

There are a lot of ways to lead. For Arriola, “It’s the little things. The big thing for me is staying positive and keeping the team positive.” According to Goff, Arriola is a “big personality” whose fluency in Spanish helps new signings from Latin America acclimate to a new team and country. Canouse is quieter, but just as much a leader through what he does on and off the field. Not all leaders are the same, and as a result not all leadership styles are the same. Some styles are needed in some situations, and other styles needed in other situations. An enthusiastic approach can keep players (and staff) going when the going is tough, but it can also be exhausting for both leader and led. A quiet and focused approach can be what’s called for to keep players (and staff) going through a long stretch, but sometimes can quash a needed spark of energy or insight that leads to a critical breakthrough. Leaders have to know themselves, and be confident enough in themselves to bring their approach to leading when that approach is needed — and to step back and let others with other approaches lead when the time is right.

Soccer is 90 minutes of systems thinking in action. The game moves through time and space, and aside from halftime, rarely stops long enough to formally regroup. That means that everyone on the team needs to know their role in the system, and needs to know what they can best do to help the system succeed in the moment. The same is true of modern organizations.

]]>https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/two-lessons-for-organizations-and-young-staff-from-two-young-players/feed/0Three Lessons and Caution for Managers from Michael Eisner’s Purchase of Portsmouth FChttps://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/three-lessons-and-caution-for-managers-from-michael-eisners-purchase-of-portsmouth-fc/
https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/three-lessons-and-caution-for-managers-from-michael-eisners-purchase-of-portsmouth-fc/#respondFri, 19 Jan 2018 13:24:06 +0000https://www.peterloge.com/?p=707The New York Times’ Rory Smith recently wrote about former Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner’s purchase of Portsmouth FC, a storied English soccer team that recently “flirted with oblivion.” Smith’s piece offers three lessons and one caution for managers and organizations beyond soccer.

Portsmouth Football Club, also called Pompey, was founded in 1898. Over its 120-year history the team has had tremendous success, most recently winning the FA Cup in 2008 (a tournament open to roughly 750 teams in the top 11 divisions of English soccer, from Biggleswade United in the Spartans South Midlands League to the legendary and frustrating Arsenal FC in the Premier League). Since 2008’s victory, Portsmouth slipped into the fourth tier of English soccer and and has run through a series of foreign investors. It took several thousand fans chipping in to buy the team to save it. As Smith reports, Eisner and his son have considered buying into teams in Major League Soccer in the US and in teams in England’s top division. But it wasn’t until Portsmouth that they finally invested, initially spending $7.8 million. To put that figure in perspective, Manchester United, the world’s most valuable team, is worth $3.69 billion. The most valuable team in the US is the Los Angeles Galaxy, which is worth $315 million.

As Smith notes, the Portsmouth fan-owners were understandably skeptical of another foreign investor trying to swoop in to buy their beloved club. Eisner took several steps to win and keep the support of fans from which managers coming into any troubled organization can learn.

Humility. Smith writes, “Portsmouth is a tough, tight-knit sort of a place; being lectured by a mogul who had just jetted in from California with no prior knowledge of or investment in soccer would not go over well.” Eisner learned about the town and its naval history. He pronounces Portsmouth like a local. He replies to fans’ email and retweets their comments. In commenting on the Times article on twitter, Eisner wrote: “…let me add one point. Without the great great work over 4 years by fan ownership , the PST [Pompey Supporters Trust], and Mark Catlin [Portsmouth FC CEO] there would be no Pompey.” Eisner demonstrated, and continues to demonstrate, respect for the history of the club and its fans.

New managers should do the same. No matter how troubled the company or division you are entering, it was there before you got there and if you do your job it will be there after you leave. A lot of people likely sunk a lot of their lives into the organization, and they have seen leaders come and go. The best new managers respect those who have been working hard to make the organization work.

Honesty and caution. Eisner isn’t borrowing tons of money and promising an immediate return to glory. He told the fan-owners that if they wanted quick infusions of cash, he wasn’t their guy. Instead, he committed to patience and smart growth. This approach helped secure the support of those the team needs to survive and succeed.

Organizations that are in trouble know there is no magic bumper sticker or bit of brilliance that will solve everything at once — if there were, you wouldn’t be needed because the job would have been done already. The best managers are honest about what it takes to build a strong, sustainable, organization. They express, and demonstrate, a belief in hard work and commitment to a shared goal.

A good story. As Smith put it, “In this case, the better business proposition goes hand-in-glove with the better story.” In making his pitch, Eisner used video clips of real winning professional sports teams with which he has been involved (Anaheim’s Angels and Ducks) and clips from Disney sports movies including “Remember the Titans” and “The Bad News Bears.” In Smith’s words, “Sports and movies, to Eisner, are the same thing at heart: They are both — they are all — stories.” Eisner told the fan-owners a story about their club. The story was a familiar one of hope, loss, and redemption; a once great team had fallen on hard times through no fault of its own, but with hard work and focus would win again. Portsmouth was Brando as Terry Malloy who could have been somebody if it weren’t for corrupt outsiders, and in the end rises bruised and bloody to victoriously lead a crowd at the docks. Eisner has local support in part because he is telling the fans their own best story, and making them the heroes of that story.

Leadership is, in many ways, storytelling. These stories put the staff and organization in a larger context, and like Disney’s “Miracle” about the 1980 US men’s Olympic hockey team, are true to life. This is different than true, but not quite fiction. We know the stories aren’t fully factual; we embrace them because they are familiar and help us make sense of where we are and where we are going next. The best managers then make their staff the heroes of those stories. In Lake Placid in 1980 Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) gave the speech, but it was Mike Eruzione who scored the go-ahead goal and Jim Craig who make a last minute save to preserve the lead.

Embedded in this story is a caution for Portsmouth and for managers — being the underdog is a double-edged sword. By definition an underdog is someone not as good as the opposition. Winning is never expected by either players or fans. As a result when the winning stops, which it always does, players and fans assume the failure is deserved. Shoulders drop, fans sigh, and losing becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Portsmouth is doing well and rising, but at some point the players will get their heads handed to them by a team whose worst player cost more than what Eisner spent to buy his entire team. If the players believe the loss was deserved, that the fairy tale is over, then Eisner’s story doesn’t get its Disney ending. At some point Portsmouth’s players need to be confident enough to win the games they should win and some they shouldn’t, and also confident enough to bounce back from losses.

The same is true in organizations. If your organization is the scrappy outsider fighting for a seat at the table or a shot at a big contract, you may over-perform and get the unexpected victory. But once you get that victory, you have to believe you deserve it. Being an over-performing upstart is exhausting and unsustainable, and ultimately means you will always be the outsider who everyone (including your staff) is surprised got the contract. Having used underdog status to get the initial success, managers need to coach staff to see they deserve that success and can build on it. The new contract or new project is the new status quo; sometimes you will lose bids or customers, and sometimes you will do better than expected, but your current success needs to be your norm.

For more lessons from soccer for managers and organizations look for my book Soccer Thinking for Management Success due out this summer.

]]>https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/three-lessons-and-caution-for-managers-from-michael-eisners-purchase-of-portsmouth-fc/feed/0A Noisy US Soccer Presidential Campaign is Going as Predictedhttps://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/a-noisy-us-soccer-presidential-campaign-is-going-as-predicted/
https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/a-noisy-us-soccer-presidential-campaign-is-going-as-predicted/#respondFri, 19 Jan 2018 12:19:23 +0000https://www.peterloge.com/?p=703The election for President of the US Soccer Federation is in about three weeks, making this a good time to check in on the race to lead the governing body of soccer in America.

A quick review for those whose interest in politics runs more to Michael Wolffthan Josh Wolff: Soccer in the US is overseen by the US Soccer Federation, often called US Soccer. The organization is led by an unpaid president elected by members of the Federation. The election process is far from straightforward, a confusing dance party mashup of the Democratic National Committee presidential nominating process and the electoral college. The best explanation of the process comes from Anthony DiCicco, with additional details from Grant Wahl and others. The short version is that there are several interest groups represented in the vote, each of which gets a fixed percentage of the final tally regardless of how many people are in the group. As The New York Times puts it: “The votes are split among the federation’s youth, adult, and pro councils, which each get a 25 percent share; and its athletes council, which accounts for 20 percent. The remaining 5 percent is made up of board members, life members and a fan representative.” The winning candidate must get 50%+1 of that vote. Voting continues until one candidate receives a majority. In this structure not all votes count the same. Fans get less than 5% of the final say, regardless of how many fans vote and for whom they vote, while the 20-member athletes council accounts for 20% of the final tally. As such, what matters is what those whose votes count think, and how much those votes count. Twitter does not get a vote.

Several months ago I wrote that the race was shaping up to be an insider versus outsider contest, which in this context is administrator versus former professional player. On one side are several respected soccer executives and attorneys, the most prominent of whom is Kathy Carter. One of two women in a field of eight candidates, Carter is on leave from her position running Soccer United Marketing (SUM) and said she will resign from SUM if she is elected president. Carter has a long history as a soccer executive, and she was a collegiate goalkeeper. On the other side are a number of former US National Team players, all of whom have criticized the US Soccer status quo. World Cup winning goalkeeper Hope Solo is the other woman in the race and was a late addition to the field. The anti-establishment candidates getting the most attention are former Men’s National Team players Eric Wynalda and Kyle Martino. The fourth former pro player is Paul Caligiuri.

Scrape away the noise and the race is going about as expected. Those following soccer politics assumed that Carter’s entry meant that Gulati was not going to seek another term, which turned out to be the case. The controversy about the dinner comes down to an insider candidate for president of US Soccer meeting with US Soccer insiders about her candidacy for president of US Soccer. Carter’s leadership of SUM was always going to be a double edged sword. Her campaign, and the campaign of others with a long history in US Soccer and soccer administration were always going to have to rely on a message that some changes to US Soccer are necessary, but that things are basically fine — the women keep winning and players like Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie and Josh Sargent mean the men have a bright future after an embarrassing failure to qualify for the 2018 Men’s World Cup. The insiders were never going to get the fan vote, and are wisely focusing on the relative handful of insiders needed to win while largely ignoring everyone else. Carter and other insiders are certainly talking to the grassroots and may get some support there, but those audiences are not the prime targets of the insider campaigns.

Meanwhile outsiders are meeting with local soccer leaders, and are active on social media promoting a message that not enough attention is being paid to grassroots, inner cities, and players who could represent the US or other countries. Their case was recently strengthened by a promising young player named Jonathan Gonzalez deciding he would rather play for Mexico than the US — Gonzalez played on US youth teams, but his parents are from Mexico and he has dual citizenship. This group of candidates was never going to get Gulati loyalists, or at least not many of them. Their appeal is a more populist one: those of us working in the fields (in this case on the fields) are being ignored by elite insiders who have rigged the system against the people, and unless we act now the end is nigh.Some of these candidates are former teammates and old friends of insiders with votes, but their campaigns are not focused on the soccer establishment.

Also predictably the field is narrowing. While there are eight candidates, the favorites appear to be Steve Gans, Carter, Wynalda, and Martino.

With all of the above, the below is how the election might go:
All eight candidates run on the first ballot. Given the number of candidates, no one gets a majority and the election goes to a second ballot.

The total votes for insiders compared to the total votes for outsiders on the first ballot should give a clear indication of the final result. If the split is wide (former players getting a total of 60% say), then a Wynalda/Martino alliance could seal the result on a second ballot (and if the other former players do not get a lot of support they might join the alliance making the outcome even more certain on a second ballot). Similarly, if Carter-plus the other insiders get a combined strong majority look for similar deals on that side.

If the first ballot is close then a couple deals might be struck but the field could still have four or five candidates, making the second round of voting closer but still denying anyone a majority and sending voting to a third round. With fewer candidates and the insider/outsider dynamic set, the third round could decide it. If not, the above logic repeats and the election should be over by the fourth round of voting. Given the tight time between rounds of voting, many deals will need to be struck in advance — agreements that “if the former players get a total of 60% or more, whichever one of us gets the most votes immediately endorses the other…” sort of thing.

All that said, political punditry of any sort is a dangerous game. Given the out-sized power of individual votes of those who likely know the candidates well, decisions could come down to friendships, rivalries, slights real and imagined, and who knows what else. It is also important to remember that the candidates are people — people who have put their lives on hold, quit their jobs, and in many cases are asking strangers for money to help get a position that doesn’t pay anything and that will likely be tremendously frustrating. This is also an incredibly competitive collection of people. All of the candidates played the game, four of the men at the highest level and one of the women was the best in the world. People like that don’t tend to bow out of a competition just because the odds aren’t obviously in their favor. Could be an interesting meeting in Orlando in February.

Look for Soccer Thinking for Management Success: Lessons for organizations from the world’s game this summer

]]>https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/a-noisy-us-soccer-presidential-campaign-is-going-as-predicted/feed/0Democrats can win and bring Americans together with civil religionhttps://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/democrats-can-win-and-bring-americans-together-with-civil-religion/
https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/democrats-can-win-and-bring-americans-together-with-civil-religion/#respondMon, 01 Jan 2018 20:55:12 +0000https://www.peterloge.com/?p=693“America isn’t a map or a flag. Our country isn’t a president or a party. We are an articulation of a faith in what we are at our best.” As originally published in The Hill
]]>https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/democrats-can-win-and-bring-americans-together-with-civil-religion/feed/0Four Steps Political Professionals Can Take to Improve Politicshttps://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/four-steps-political-professionals-can-take-to-improve-politics/
https://www.peterloge.com/uncategorized/four-steps-political-professionals-can-take-to-improve-politics/#respondThu, 21 Dec 2017 02:24:09 +0000https://www.peterloge.com/?p=645Those of us who work in politics have obligations to the political system. This system, our constitutional republic, is a bold experiment in governance that demands respect and needs nurturing to survive. Our system succeeds or fails based on how those of us in system behave, and we need to behave better.

Today is the filing deadline for candidates for president of the US Soccer Federation. Between now and the election in February there will be lots of hot-taking, statement parsing, and political predicting. Soccer fans like to express opinions. A lot of soccer fans are also politics fans (or at least followers) and like to express opinions about politics as well. For many of us the urge to express opinions about the politics of soccer politics can be too great to resist.

As such, a few reminders about soccer politics and political predictions are in order.

First and most importantly, the election is about who gets to vote in the election and how much those votes count. In his interview with Sam Borden at ESPN in which he announced he was not running for re-election, US Soccer president Sunil Gulati said: “…the general perception in the soccer community versus the people who vote in elections may be different right now.” By the “soccer community”he means people like you and me. By “people who vote in elections” he means the members of the Federation who get to vote, and how much those votes count — most doing hot-taking, parsing, and predicting aren’t those people (at least I’m not).

Who does vote? An excellent question to which Anthony DiCicco has the best answer. In reviewing the rules about who gets to vote note that not all votes count the same — the winner needs 50%+1 of how the votes count, which may or may not be 50%+1 of the votes cast or of the opinion of soccer fans broadly.

I have compared the election for president of US Soccer to the way the Democratic National Committee selects the presidential nominee. I was wrong; it is more like what would happen if the DNC and the electoral college had a secret love child.

Second, political professionals are terrible predictors of politics. In a 2005 book called Expert Political Judgement, University of Pennsylvania professor Phil Tetlock reported on 20 years of data measuring expert political predictions. One reviewer noted that the results of one of Tetlock’s tests found that “Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world…are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys.” I would extend this caution to those who predict soccer politics as well.

They (we) tend to be bad at predicting things like elections for a few reasons:

We’re overconfident. We tend to think that because we’ve been doing something for a while, and because we follow a topic closely, we are pretty sure what’s going to happen next. That’s a pretty poor assumption. If someone is certain they know who will win the Federation presidential election, odds are better than even they are wrong.

We’re dogmatic and don’t update our predictions based on new information. The most successful predictors update their forecasts as they learn new, relevant, information. The world changes and those changes sometimes matter. That said, we tend to get distracted by the irrelevant details and miss the important big stuff — to steal the title of a book that goes to great lengths to make this point, we aren’t very good at telling the signal from the noise.

We mistakenly assume that since we came to a given conclusion, others must come to that conclusion as well. This is called the false consensus effect. Just because you and everyone you know thinks a given candidate is the obvious choice for president of US Soccer doesn’t meant that anyone whose vote counts agrees with you. Similarly we tend to look for and agree with information with which we agree — this is the confirmation bias (and its cousin motivated reasoning). As a species we’re fond of saying “I knew it all along.”